the car update is that it was the battery. >.< the guy from the garage who's been working on it this whole time actually came over - i'm around the corner, it's not far - used pliers to get a better grip on the little emergency key that comes with the clicker, got the door open (yay), and popped the hood. where he hooked something up to the battery to learn... it was dead. he charged it enough for me to drive the car over and called towards the end of the day to say the battery - which wasn't even that old - was defective and he put in a new one. so i went back to pick up my car and drive it home. there's still an issue - every time you open the driver's side door you get an alert that the car isn't in park even tho it is - this alert is accompanied by the kind of binging noise the car makes when it wants you to fasten your seatbelt and it is exceptionally annoying - but i'm tired of leaving my car at the garage so i can be told "we don't know what's wrong with it and no it won't be ready by the weekend" so i'll just bring it back some time in the near future. and in any case i have it back and it works and i'm relieved.

that's all the news that's local. :D in exciting international news the good voters of hungary voted authoritarian viktor orban out after sixteen years (and i somehow doubt he was helped by jd vance showing up to stump for him). it was the highest voter turnout since 1989.

watch the artemis ii splashdown if like me you missed it the first time. space travel and return will never not be fabulously cool.

You saved me, you should remember me.

The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats.
Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms.

When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling.

I remember sounds like that from my childhood,
laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful,
something like that.

Lugano. Tables under the apple trees.
Deckhands raising and lowering the colored flags.
And by the lake’s edge, a young man throws his hat into the water;
perhaps his sweetheart has accepted him.

Crucial
sounds or gestures like
a track laid down before the larger themes

and then unused, buried.

Islands in the distance. My mother
holding out a plate of little cakes—

as far as I remember, changed
in no detail, the moment
vivid, intact, having never been
exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age
hungry for life, utterly confident—

By the tables, patches of new grass, the pale green
pieced into the dark existing ground.

Surely spring has been returned to me, this time
not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet
it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly.

--"Vita Nova", Louise Glück